Pages

Oct 15, 2016

I'm in Washington DC, visiting my old friend Alan for the week before Easter and Passover. My partner Lane calls, like he does every day, and Infinite Chazz gets on the phone.

"You'll never believe this! Last night I was dumped!"

"That is hard to believe!" I exclaim. "You're never rejected. You just walk up to the guy, flash your patented smile, and he's writing down his phone number!"

Infinite Chazz is 21 years old, a student at Cal State Fullerton, called "Infinite" not only because of his enormous Mortadella, but because he's infinitely attractive, sure to cause jaw-dropping stares in every gay who comes within five feet of him. He drives up every couple of weeks, to "share" and make the guys at the synagogue or MCC die of envy.

"Not this time. And you'll never guess who dumped me."

"Jerry O'Connell?" I joke. The star of Sliders was the prime time hunk du jour.

"Close. Mark-Paul Gosselaar."

"What? Are you sure? Is this a fantasy?"

"I wish! I'm still smarting from the rejection."

Mark-Paul Gosselaar was the teen-dream star of Saved by the Bell (1988-1994), Zack Morris, the constantly-in-trouble operator of Bayside High. Every gay boy in the country had his pin-up on his bedroom wall; most realized that they were gay watching the buddy-bonding romance between Zack and Mario Lopez's Slater.

"I'm not saying he's not hot," I tell Chazz, "Or that he's not a nice guy, but he's never had any gay rumors, that I know of. He's a hetero horndog, dating every supermodel he sees."

"Well, last night, he made two exceptions. Me, and the guy he dumped me for."

Oct 14, 2016

Speaking of retreads, Disney's True Jackson, VP was about a 15-year old girl who becomes the vice president of a quirky fashion company. The Canadian series Some Assembly Required (2014-) goes one step farther: when a defective chemistry set destroys Jarvis Raines' house, he sues the toy company, and ends up owning it!

Jarvis (Kolton Stewart, right, previously the star of the dance drama The Next Step) has a lot of ideas for interesting toys, so he moves in, along with an eclectic group of employees from his school:

1. Piper (Charlie Storwick, a center), a computer whiz who has a crush on Jarvis.

The former owner, Candace (Ellie Harvey of The New Addams Family) sneaks in as cleaning lady "Mrs. Bupkis" to undermine the company.

Heterosexual romance is in the air: Piper has a crush on Jarvis, and Knox has a crush on Candace. But there is also a nearly-gay character, and Jarvis can't seem to keep his eyes off Knox's muscles.

By the way, Dylan Playfair is the son of Jim Playfair, a former Canadian hockey star who is now an assistant coach for the Phoenix Coyotes. Groomed for a career in hockey, Dylan played all through high school, but after suffering a concussion during a game, decided that he wanted to do something else with his life: act.

How did Dad respond to this less than macho career ambition?

He was surprisingly supportive.

So Dylan attended Vancouver Acting School, did some modeling, and worked as a bartender while auditioning. Within a year, he was cast in Grave Encounters 2 (2012)
His character is introduced smoking marijuana.

Dad wasn't happy.

Since 2012, Dylan has been very busy, playing three hockey players, a college student in a murder mystery, and a high school runner in a buddy-bonding movie. In 2016, he starred in the tv series Haters Back Off.
Good advice.

Mario Lopez has been unfailingly pro-gay (except for a tweet proclaiming his love for love for Chick-Fil-A, which was quickly removed). But what about his Saved by the Bell buddy Mark-Paul Gosselaar?

He hasn't been quite as vocal in his support, but he seems cool with gay fans: "There are people out there who desperately want me to be gay. I don't have the heart to set the record straight."

My friend Infinite Chazz claims to have dated him.

Born in 1974, the child star burst -- literally -- into teen idol fame in 1989 when he was hired to play one of the supporting players in the Hayley Mills vehicle Good Morning, Miss Bliss, about a caring junior high teacher.

But after a year it became Saved by the Bell, with Zack Morris, Mark-Paul's glib teen operator the undisputed star. It lasted for four years, spawned two spin-off series and innumerable Saturday morning clones, and gained 24 Young Actor Awards nominations.

The plots of Saved by the Bell mostly involved demonstrating that the teens were heterosexual -- falling in love with the wrong person, deciding if the kiss meant anything, having two dates on the same night -- with a smattering of minor social problems, like smoking or cheating on tests.

But same-sex desire was always lurking just beneath the surface. Zack, gay-coded as blond, pretty, stylish, fashion-conscious, and vain, is often the butt of jokes about misdirected or misinterpreted desire.

When Zack qualifies for the track team so they can beat Valley High, Principal Belding (Davis Haskins) hugs him and cries "I love you!" Seeing the suspicious looks from passing students, Belding backtracks into an arm-clasp and "I like you!" More suspicious looks, so he backs off altogether and says "Uh...I mean good job, son."

There's a knock at Zack's bedroom door. Thinking that it's his girlfriend, Zack opens it wide and exclaims "I love you!" The school weirdo Screech walks in, waits for audience howls to die down a bit, and says "I love you too...but only as a friend."

Strangely, none of these jokes involve Zack and his constant companion, sullen jock Slater (Mario Lopez). Maybe they can't occur with passionate partners, or they would bring their unstated romance too close to the surface.

After Saved by the Bell, Mark-Paul played mostly conventional, even old-fashioned heterosexuals: a horny college boy in Dead Man on Campus (1998), a computer exec who moves back to his quaint small town in Hyperion Bay (1998-99); plus the standard detectives and cops. His Detective John Clark on NYPD Blue (2001-2005) had a number of risky sexual encounters with women to assuage his grief after his girlfriend dies.

And there was very little beefcake, at least on screen. An accomplished athlete, Mark-Paul was often photographed swimming, scuba diving, and engaged in other sports that involve bulges or bare chests.

In Franklin and Bash (2011-2014), Mark-Paul returned to buddy-bonding, playing Detective Bash to Brecklin Meyer's Detective Franklin. Though both are horndogs, the homoerotic subtext is strong and obviously intentional, an attempt to cash in on the 2000s bromance fad.

Truth Be Told (2014) was a buddy comedy starring Mark-Paul and Tone Bell as odd-couple best friends.

And fans got to see more of Mark-Paul's still impressive physique than they have in twenty years, in spite of TV Guide's heterosexist assurance that he goes shirtless only "for the ladies."

Oct 12, 2016

On The Simpsons episode "Two Bad Neighbors," which aired in January 1996, former President George Bush moves into the house across the street from the Simpsons, and become Mr. Wilson to Bart's Dennis the Menace. Meanwhile Homer, feuding with George, tricks him into believing that his two sons, George W.. and Jeb, are visiting.

I stay as far away from politics as possible -- at the time I had never heard of either of them. I would hear a lot later, of course, when George W. became a viciously homophobic President, and Jeb the viciously homophobic governor of Florida.

But still, I assumed from The Simpsons that George Herbert Walker Bush (1926-) had only two children.

Turns out he had six.

Yesterday I went through his entire family tree, looking for someone who was gay-friendly. And for beefcake photos, of course.

1. George W. Bush (1946-) graduated from Yale (as a legacy) and Harvard Business School, worked as an oilman and owned a baseball team before becoming governor of Texas and then President of the U.S. for a gruelling eight years (2001-2009). He hasn't mellowed on gay marriage, or anything else gay -- he hates gay people now as much as he ever did.

Daughter: Barbara Pierce Bush (1981-), a Yale graduate, fundraiser, and activist. Gay-friendly! Appears in a pro-marriage equality PSA released by the Human Rights Campaign. She was dating graffiti artist Miky Fabrega (top photo), who painted in his underwear, but recently she's been linked to Franck Raharinosy

2. Robin Bush: died in childhood.

3. Jeb Bush (1953): got a degree in Latin American Affairs from the University of Texas, moved into real estate and then politics, becoming Governor of Florida, (1999-2007), and then throwing his hat in the presidential ring in 2016 but losing out in the primaries. He hasn't mellowed, either. He's an all around bigot.

Son: George P. Bush (1976), Texas land commissioner who apparently is into some very shady stuff. He's strongly opposed to gay rights.

Son: Jeb Bush Jr (1983), left, budding politician. He's had a few run-ins with the police. Strongly opposed to...well, you get the idea. At least he looks nothing like his father.

4. Dorothy Bush Koch (1959-): got her degree in sociology from Boston College, is a fund-raiser and philanthropist. Her first husband, Robert Koch, was a wine distributor...and a Democrat! Maybe she's gay-friendly.

6. Marvin Bush (1956-): has a degree in English from the University of Virginia. An insurance agent. No word on his attitude toward gay people.

Son: Charles Walker Bush (1989-)

You're probably wondering about Billy Bush, the host of Access Hollywood and The Today Show, who appears on the famous video with Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women. He's the son of Jonathan Bush, George H. W. Bush's brother. Apparently as homophobic as his cousins.

But the only Bush I could find chest shots of. Here he poses with Chippendale dancers.

Oct 11, 2016

Getting famous today doesn't require an agent, a recording contract, or a public relations firm. It requires a social media account, creativity, and killer abs.

Jake and Logan Paul are brothers from Cleveland who started posting goofy photos and videos on the social media sites Vine and Youtube, and before they knew it, they were stars.

6.5 million followers on Instagram, 5.2 million followers on Vine, 1.0 million followers on Twitter.

My blog has 7.5 million page views. Logan's Vine has 4 billion.

When he's not posting, 21-year old Logan is a former high school wrestler now studying industrial engineering at Ohio University and doing some acting.

He's appeared on Law and Order: SVU, Stitchers, and Foursome, and stars in the Youtube Red movie The Thinning.

19 year old Jake dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles to pursue his acting career, and found that being a social media star opened a lot of doors. He has appeared in the teen comedies Dance Camp (2016) and Mono (2016), and is now starring in the Disney Channel's Bizaardvark.

He has published nude full-frontal selfies in Instinct magazine, making him probably the only actor to pose nude for a gay magazine while starring in a Disney Channel teencom.

For 20 years all of my friends and neighbors, the guy on the next treadmill at the gym, the couple ahead of me in line at the grocery store, everyone I passed on the street was gay. I got my news from The Advocate. I bought my books in a gay bookstore. I went to a gay church.

Now I'm living in Dayton, Ohio, in the midst of the Straight World. There's one gay bar, on the other side of town, and no gay organizations except The Friends of the Italian Opera, a closeted group of gay retirees. The nearest gay neighborhood is an hour's drive away.

I'm not adjusting well. I have no friends except a "straight" Friend With Benefits. I stop going to the gym, and gain weight. I'm so depressed that I seek out psychological counseling. And I have a series of crazy dates with sleazoids and jerks.

But tonight will be different. It's a blind date, arranged by Clintin (who I hooked up with last February), so I haven't actually met him yet, but he sounds great: Remy, 36 years old, a history professor (specializing in 19th century America), who lives in the gay neighborhood of Germantown in Columbus.

January 15, 1980, a very cold, snowy Tuesday night during my sophomore year in college. Fred the Ministerial Student and I are watching tv in his living room. He is my first real boyfriend, and we have just started dating, so everything we watch seems bright and sexy and memorable.

7:00 pm: The White Shadow: A young female teacher gets a crush on high school basketball player Salami (Timothy Van Patten). Fred explains how Timothy Van Patten got the nickname "Salami" in real life: he has the largest endowment in Hollywood, and is willing to prove it to anyone who asks.

Wait -- a man-mountain like that is gay? I'm just getting over the myth of all gay men being willowy swishes., so I can't believe it. There are no gay reference books yet, and no internet, so there's no way to investigate.

8:30 pm: Taxi:Taxi company mechanicLatke (Andy Kaufman) falls in love with a girl from his home country. Fred tells me that Tony Danza, who plays driver Tony Banta, is gay -- he had a nude photo spread in In Touch magazine.

9:00 pm: Hart to Hart:An old woman in Jonathan's building is being blackmailed. Fred tells me that Robert Wagner, who plays millionaire sleuth Jonathan Hart, used to go to naked pool parties in the Hollywood Hills with gay actors like Marlon Brando and Tab Hunter.

What about the screen hunk on Three's Company? Turns out that he was Steve Sandor (1937-) a former steel worker and air force police officer who had been playing man-mountains since 1967, on Star Trek, Canon, The Rookies, Ironside, Starsky and Hutch, and many other dramas. He rarely did comedy.

He would go on to more guest spots, plus a sword-and-sorcery hero in the animated Fire and Ice (1983) and a post-Apocalyptic hero in the Road Warrior rip-off Stryker (1983).

He stopped acting in the late 1990s. No word on whether he's actually gay or not.

When I studied Spanish, I got songs about liking blonde girls ("Las rubias me gustan mas") and a story about Juan y Maria in love, though when I snooped around on my own, I found Papa Solteroand the boy band Menudo. When I studied French, I got comics: the muscular RomanAlixand his Egyptian boyfriend Enak; Asterix the Gaul; the cowboy Lucky Luke; the race car driver Michel Vaillant; bellhop turned adventurerSpirou and his reporter boyfriend Fantasio;and of course, Tintin.

A teenage reporter, Tintin first appeared in the Belgian children's magazine Le Petit Vingtième. 23 comic albums, or bandes-dessinees, appeared between 1930 and 1976, sending Tintin to the Congo, Egypt, Tibet, America, and eventually the Moon (a 24th, Tintin and Aleph-Art, was left unfinished at cartoonist Herge's death). The albums have been translated into over 100 languages, and in an interesting twist, dozens of dialects. Would you like to know how the Antwerp and Oostend dialect differs from ordinary Dutch? How about Picard and Gallois from standard French?

There was not a lot of beefcake in the comic stories or the animated films and tv series, but two live-action films starring Jean-Pierre Talbot took care of that.

Early on, Tintin made new friends in each adventure. His most intimate relationship came in The Blue Lotus, when he rescued Chang, a Chinese boy victimized by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

But in The Crab with the Golden Claws, Tintin meets the blustering, irascible Captain Haddock and helps him reclaim his ancestral home, Marlinspike Manor. Tintin moves in. After that, there is no question: they are a couple..

During their adventures, Haddock and Tintin work as a team, rescuing each other over and over, hugging, pressing against each other. At home, they are blatantly domestic, often shown sitting at breakfast, lounging around the parlor, going to movies, taking vacations.

Neither expresses any interest in women, but in Tintin in Tibet,when Tintin's old friend Chang writes to ask for help, Haddock blisters with jealousy and refuses to accompany him on the adventure (he relents later). And when Haddock spends time with a new friend, Tintin mopes and pouts.

Many commentators, including Jamie Bell, who played Tintin in the 2011 movie, have noticed that Tintin and Haddock behave precisely as a gay couple.

Even Herge himself found it necessary to address the "accusations": he said that Tintin and Haddock could not actively pursue women because mostly boys read the comics, and they were interested in adventure, not romance. But if that is the case, why did Herge put them into a relationship that looked and felt precisely like a romance?

Anyway, he was wrong: gay boys wanted both adventure and romance. And they found both in Tintin.

When Gay Was Unspoken

Beefcake, male bonding, and gay symbolism in the movies, tv programs, books, toys, and comics of a Baby Boomer childhood. Some autobiographical stories and stories about beefcake around the world.

Note: Most posts are about how gay people can find meaning in homophobic or heterosexist texts. If you don't want to hear about that, stay away. No profanity, insults, anti-gay slurs, name-calling,or homophobia allowed. You will be blocked, and comments on the post will be disabled.